IT is impossible to go over the top over The Lord Of The Rings.

Peter Jackson's monumental Tolkien trilogy has already gone there, and Part 3 is even longer than the two anti-fascist fantasies that have gone before in setting a new landmark for audacious screen adaptations of 'difficult' novels.

This Ring cycle has been a monumental journey for director, cast and audience alike - we have all aged watching the hours clock up - and Jackson's Herculean endeavours will surely end with a garland of Oscars next spring. Jealous peers were once reluctant to honour Steven Spielberg, his forerunner in fantasy, but lightning will not strike twice.

Like Spielberg, Jackson is an inventor rather than an artist. Like Spielberg, he is a storyteller with an instinct for adventure, humour and darkness and light in the arena of family entertainment rooted in the battle between good and evil. Where he differs, on the evidence of the Ring trilogy, is in his bittersweet tone.

The Return Of The King picks up the allegorical story where it seems to have been stuck forever despite moving forward relentlessly with a demented energy.

Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) is seeking to reclaim his throne in Gondor (the clue is in the title); Ian McKellen's increasingly fruity Gandalf is always in more need of a horse than Shakespeare's Richard III; and Frodo Baggins (bug-eyed Elijah Wood) is still burdened with transporting the Ring to Mordor on a crawl of a journey more fraught than the M6 on a Friday evening. He remains trapped in the quicksand of a grave fight for his soul between fellow Hobbit Sam and the duplicitous, schizophrenic Gollum (Andy Serkis with that serpent sting of a voice).

Meanwhile, Jackson's vision of Middle Earth retains its basic tenets. All swashbuckling men must have fantastically heavy-metal hair (not a bald head in sight); most women must do little more than scream with terror while clinging to their latest dirty-faced child; and there is always another army of 'orrible Orcs around the corner. Indeed they have become even more proficient at reproduction than locusts, while perfecting their Texas Chainsaw Massacre look.

Amid the now familiar special effects and symphonic spectacle, Jackson never loses sight of the storytelling, nor of the emotional, self-sacrificing dilemmas faced by the raft of heroic characters (dilemmas represented by the tendency to speak very slowly indeed, duly stretching the running time to 201 minutes).

Yes, it could be shorter, even though some story lines are crudely truncated, and the four false endings are a bathetic anti-climax, but Jackson's journey benefits from the lulls. The bone-crunching battle scenes, whether filmed in close combat or panning across an ant-sized army of thousands, demand recovery time, either in Frodo's fraught progress and encounter with the giant spider Shelob, or the nimble comedy of the Hobbits, or occasional dreamy interludes with pointy-eared Liv Tyler and Cate Blanchett.

The Lord Of The Rings lords it over The Matrix trilogy - and it makes sense.

Updated: 15:39 Thursday, December 18, 2003